It was standard for graphics card makers of the time to include tiny heatsinks. Often they would even omit a heatsink altogether.
TNT2 M64, Voodoo 3, MGA-200, these all had these black spiky heatsinks or heatsinks that were essentially chipset heatsinks mounted with these pushthrough pins.

It's always good to add a pic of your own hardware, but from images I googled it appears your card has one of these smaller black heatsinks similar to contemporary chipset heatsinks.

This should be relatively easy to replace, if the heat is worrying you. But cards of that era did tend to run hot, so I doubt something is broken (though cannot exclude it).

I've used several TNT2 M64 graphics cards, though of other make, and these had no issue with these passive heatsinks.

My guess is that you should be fine, but if it bothers you, do something about it. There were even larger passive chipset heatsinks sold back then, I know Zalman made on and it should fit. It's very tall though. You could even use some other larger heatsink, drill a couple holes at the right place (in the heatsink that is 😜) and add those to your card.

Or shoehorn a fan directly to the small heatsink.

athlon-power wrote:

Anyways, the heat sink on it is quite hot- I can only touch it for 2 or 3 seconds before it starts burning me when it's at full load.

What's that work out to, about 50 c? Not terribly high.

I had such a V3800 when it was new around 2000. It did not have a heatsink. It started to malfunction and showed garbled output. As it was within the warrenty period I returned it to the store ... a week or so later I got the original card back with a small heatsink attached to to the main chip. Kind of a let down, but the problems were indeed solved.

vvbee wrote:

What's that work out to, about 50 c? Not terribly high.

That was sort of on my mind as well. Using touch to measure temperature really isn't that good of an idea, but like I said, it's all I got. If I could, I'd use a laser thermometer for sure. Lower temperatures for electronics can be too high for humans, and so it's really hard to test anything that's around or above that temperature, that's ignoring the complete lack of any actual accuracy.

Tetrium wrote:

My guess is that you should be fine, but if it bothers you, do something about it. There were even larger passive chipset heatsinks sold back then, I know Zalman made on and it should fit. It's very tall though. You could even use some other larger heatsink, drill a couple holes at the right place (in the heatsink that is 😜) and add those to your card.

Or shoehorn a fan directly to the small heatsink.

I actually was going to try and attach a Socket 7 cooling fan to it, but I got that in an old case I bought, and it was beyond repair even before I touched the thing.

As far as trying a new heatsink goes, I probably won't worry about it unless stuff like this starts happening:

gerwin wrote:

I had such a V3800 when it was new around 2000. It did not have a heatsink. It started to malfunction and showed garbled output. As it was within the warrenty period I returned it to the store ... a week or so later I got the original card back with a small heatsink attached to to the main chip. Kind of a let down, but the problems were indeed solved.

Also, I find that funny. At least it was under warranty, but I'm sure they must've used some sort of thermal glue to attach it, if it didn't come with a heatsink already. Hopefully, when mine starts genuinely overheating, only stuff like this will happen, and I will know to get a better cooling solution.

I don't know why your version doesn't, but my 16Mb version came with a fan.

I think they thought having a fan would make the card more attractive to retail customers than just a heatsink. The world had yet to discover that those fans often last about 12 months.

swaaye wrote:

I think they thought having a fan would make the card more attractive to retail customers than just a heatsink. The world had yet to discover that those fans often last about 12 months.

There was no problems with the fan when I tested the card last year. I bet that one has lasted more than 12 months. Mine with the fan is also older model than the one he has.

Here's my card:

Baoran wrote:

I don't know why your version doesn't, but my 16Mb version came with a fan.

The heatsink also has a different design than mine, it looks smaller, and it seems that it's designed for a fan. I'm thinking that it's similar to today's cards, where they just made passively-cooled models alongside actively-cooled counterparts.

swaaye wrote:

I think they thought having a fan would make the card more attractive to retail customers than just a heatsink. The world had yet to discover that those fans often last about 12 months.

I would agree with you, if it weren't for the fact that Baoran's heatsink looks specifically designed for a fan. The heatsink itself is quite a bit thinner than mine, when you consider how thick the fan is. I don't estimate that the heatsink on that particular card is more than 2 centimeters thick or so. It's very hard to tell, but it doesn't rise that far off of the PCB with a fan, let alone without one. Maybe this is putting too much trust in ASUS, but I don't feel like they'd go through all that trouble to design an entirely different heatsink that would effectively be useless without a fan, just to put a fan that would die quickly onto it. I could see that point if the heatsink looked like mine, with a fan shoehorned onto it.

athlon-power wrote:

... Maybe this is putting too much trust in ASUS, but I don't feel like they'd go through all that trouble to design an entirely different heatsink that would effectively be useless without a fan, just to put a fan that would die quickly onto it. ...

Oh, believe me, they would. This is a digression, but years later, Asus would put out Socket 754 and 939 Athlon 64 motherboards with those kinds of purpose-made, low-profile HSFs clipped onto their Nvidia nForce 4 chipsets. The "heatsink" part was more form than function, and the fans became noisy and died quickly, often taking the nForce chips with them from the resulting heat, which turned many of those otherwise relatively high-quality motherboards into bricks. You can Google "Asus A8N-SLI chipset cooler" for countless forum threads about this issue.

SW-SSG wrote:

Oh, believe me, they would. This is a digression, but years later, Asus would put out Socket 754 and 939 Athlon 64 motherboards with those kinds of purpose-made, low-profile HSFs clipped onto their Nvidia nForce 4 chipsets. The "heatsink" part was more form than function, and the fans became noisy and died quickly, often taking the nForce chips with them from the resulting heat, which turned many of those otherwise relatively high-quality motherboards into bricks. You can Google "Asus A8N-SLI chipset cooler" for countless forum threads about this issue.

This makes me angry. Well, funnily enough, I'm going to be starting a Socket 754 build soon, so now I know not to buy any ASUS boards from that era (at least, not the ones that use that specific cooler on them, or just replace one of those coolers with a better aftermarket one, or one that comes from a different motherboard). The nVidia nForce chipsets were good quality chipsets, too- that's mainly what upsets me about this, as far as the motherboards are concerned.

For the V3800M's, it might be possible to go online and find newer, better quality fans for them, but I feel like finding ones of that specific size would be a difficult undertaking. Maybe getting a dead V3800M online and ripping the passive cooler off of it, and putting it onto the card that came with the fan would be a better idea. Thanks for the heads-up though, especially concerning the motherboards. That was a piece of advice for a problem that I never knew existed, and that will probably help me in the near future (I don't know if I'd ever be able to afford high-end motherboards from that time, to be honest).

My Asus V3800M still works after 17 years of use, FWIW.

I never really found use for agp versions of tnt2 m64 cards. I feel like they are too slow for agp systems and I usually use something like geforce 2 from 2000. Pci version of tnt2 m64 is very useful though for older systems that don't have agp.

Baoran wrote:

I never really found use for agp versions of tnt2 m64 cards. I feel like they are too slow for agp systems and I usually use something like geforce 2 from 2000. Pci version of tnt2 m64 is very useful though for older systems that don't have agp.

The PCI ones are definitely more usable, but the AGP ones I prefer to use when matching with Voodoo2 as to preserve a PCI slot and perhaps to offload some load off of the PCI bus.
And the TNT2 M64 cards have low power consumption compared to most other AGP cards while being comparable to Voodoo2 (roughly).